High school lockers - no longer free

When I started high school, for some reason, I had to share a locker with another kid from my homeroom. He decided he was going to share our locker with all of his mates and I no longer felt secure leaving my skateboard there. So I spent the remainder of the year carrying everything around with me. I never could get the hang of those darn combination locks anyway.

That might be the option a lot of Florida teens pick this year as well -- One high school has decided to begin charging for the use of their lockers. Admittedly, the cost is only $5 -- less than many accessories available these days to pimp out a locker -- but it's still a significant change. The school cites shrinking budgets, declining enrollment, and the cost of maintaining the lockers as the reason for the new charge. At least two other schools in the area also charge for the use of a locker.

Five dollars isn't a lot, especially when you consider that the school spends between two and five thousand dollars each year repairing the lockers and changing combinations. Still, I think I would probably have just carried my stuff around with me. Of course, these days, I'm an old fart with a bad back, so five bucks for a place to stash my stuff doesn't sound half bad.

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Charging for lockers deprives kids of their *free and public* education. Given the size and weight of the books and school supplies, and the fact there is no place else to stash the books (like a desk or floor space), it is unreasonable to expect the kids to bring everything with them from class to class.

Yes, schools are hard up for $$$. I am a teacher in a public school. We don't have enough $$$ to pay for special education teachers, school supplies, snacks for kids who don't have them, full time art, music PE teachers, etc. etc. etc. One of the first things to go from city budgets is school funding, also from state and national government budgets. Plus NO ONE wants to pay higher taxes to pay for schools, especially people who don't have kids, or who have kids no longer in school. Of course if public education were an actuall priority in this country then maybe we wouldn't ask kids to bring in $5 here and there for things like lockers and field trips!

Schools not having the money is a bunch of baloney. Teachers in my district make more money than my husband and I put together. My taxes are sky-high. My husband and I are EACH driving 10-year-old Dodges. Yet pull into the parking lot of any school in our district and all you see are the BMWs, Hummers and SUVs that the teachers are buying with my tax money. I actually had to sit at a PTA meeting and listen while a teacher went on and on about her Botox treatments. She was carrying a Prada bag that was about $600 and when she left I watched her get into a brand new Jaguar that my husband recognized as being top of the line. She is not married and by her own admission came from an average income family so her husband or family did not pay for all this; I did. In addition, I am shocked at how many teachers in this school district are functioning illiterates. The notes they send home are loaded with spelling, grammar and tense mistakes. One idiot wrote "varified" when she meant "verify." She did not even get the tense correct. She makes nearly $80,000 a year so I guess part of her salary goes to time spent making up her own words. I suggest that instead of nickel and diming the families over lockers, we take it out of the salaries of these bums.

Here in GA, they cut school funding before anything. Our teachers make (with 5+ years) 28k or so (maybe less if no masters?) and still pay for their supplies. It's horrible the way the school system is treated here and last year due to STATE cuts, we lost 10 teachers at one school and like 50+ county wide, not including Staff (Parapros and such). It gets me so upset when I think about how the schools are treated here. It makes me re-think my working on my degree for teaching and looking in to nursing.

I remeber our lockers were free in my highschool, but I think it's $50 a year here for a gym one and a homeroom one with a waver signed. That limits how many kids are going to get one since it's so costly.

Our school didn't charge for lockers, and we really didn't have enough of them. We weren't allowed to carry a bag, backpack, purse or even a jacket around with us (this was before it got so bad they had to put in metal detectors at most high schools and went to clear plastic bookbags), so even if they charged $100 we would have had to pay it to stash our winter coats and our school texts.

I don't think they're charging it in order to deter anyone from using them, because I'm sure they could get away with higher fees if that was the case. I think they're charging to make two points 1) it costs money to maintain these things and 2) to get kids to respect the school property a bit more.

When I was in junior high we had these weird two-part lockers that had a smaller-than-normal regular locker and a latch that opened a door to an overhead shelf. The problem was any jerk could stick a piece of cardboard into the side of the overhead door and pop it open so by the second week of school, everyone knew not to put anything on that shelf. We all had to jam everything we owned into a tiny half-locker that was designed just to hold a coat or cart it around with us all day. They were the biggest wastes. They just closed that school which is a good thing; no student should have to pay one red cent for that useless locker.

karenjean-I don't know what district you live in, but I would LOVE to work there. My first year of teaching I made $27,000. I put in AT LEAST 50 hours a week and at least 5-6 hours each weekend. This will be my 9th year teaching, and I do make a bit more money, (although, not keeping up with inflation and sky high energy bills) and I still put in the time. I don't have enough money to buy prada bags or even new clothes for each school year. I spend a large amount of money on my classroom and I really care about my students (sometimes more than there parents, I think!) Please do not judge all public schools by your town, we struggle and we do the best we can!

My 7th grader's middle school is so over-crowded! How over-crowded is it? For the 2nd year in a row, all of his classes except gym & band are in trailers (there're about 40 trailers again this year). Since all of those kids are outside, they don't get lockers (which we'd have to pay $5 for, but would love to have) -- What would be the point of that? Well, since all of those kids don't have lockers, they DON'T GET BOOKS!! We don't want to break their little backs carrying all of that heavy stuff around in the heat. Today is the first day of school (Henry Co., GA) and should be about 93 degrees by this afternoon! He'll get a social studies book, the rest is in workbooks or handouts. There's a set of books in each classroom, in case anyone doesn't finish their work and needs to check one out. My taxes are high! We have too many kids going to school out-of-district!

Hey Teacher, move to Pennsylvania. You will get rich stealing from the taxpayers while doing almost nothing in return and be accountable to no one for it. Thanks to the tenure system we have teachers who spend all day talking to friends, reading and smoking while the kids watch a 40-year-old film or are given useless busywork. Gym teachers throw basketballs at the kids then disappear. One of them was caught having sex with a hall aide in the locker room. He was rewarded with an administrative position in the neighboring district at a huge pay increase. He cannot speak, read or write but makes $100,000 a year as an educator. The only way to get rid of them is to offer huge buyouts. Then some new kid comes in, sees the gravy train and does the same thing.Just watch our teacher parking lot at 2:15 as they rush to get off campus before the buses leave. We have at least one car accident every year, usually one teacher rear ending another in their haste to get away from their 6-hour work day.Fridays are miserable as teachers practically kill each other to get away to their vacation homes at the Jersey shore or in the Poconos (some have both). When their investment plans lost money, we, the taxpayers, had money stolen from us to make up the shortcoming. No one makes up for our losses on the market.Teachers have fantastic health benefits that they contribute nothing to; it's all on us. Their co-pay is $5 and they bitch like crazy because it went up from $3; ours is $20 and we have to contribute to the plan.Teachers use recycled lesson plans and have the kids grade each other's papers so they won't have to do any extra work. My daughter's grade suffered because a moron sat next to her and graded her work. He couldn't figure anything out so he kept marking her work wrong. The teacher never checked so my daughter got a "C" when she did "A" work. There was no arguing it. The same idiot teacher was stunned at my daughter's high SAT score; she thought my kid was stupid based on the unsupervised grades of a truly stupid kid. She then accused my daughter of laziness, never catching on even though she was told point-blank a thousand times what was happening. We have had co-curricular activities dropped because no teacher wants to stay after school to run them; they want to go home to their $500,000 homes and swim in their custom designed pools. One guy had a three-hole golf course landscaped into his yard. Summer programs? Forget it. No teacher wants to give up time at his/her vacation home to run a program.Just try to get a teacher to stay after school to help a kid; they laugh in your face and tell you to pay a tutor.Teacher conferences are insulting and useless. I went to Princeton but am spoken to as though I were a pre-schooler by people who cannot construct three consecutive grammatically correct English sentences but who out-earn me while doing a fraction of the work I do because the teacher's union is so strong. So come here and have all this and you, too, won't have to do anything for it or answer to anyone.

At my school, there are 3,000+ students and only about a thousand lockers. So what do they do instead of building more lockers? They make us fork over $50 for one small locker! Locker for every single student should be required in every high school. And making us pay for them is just plain ridiculous. Lockers can greatly reduce the pain that results from a heavy backpack, and everyone should be allowed one, not just those who have an extra $50 lying around.

At my school, there are 3,000+ students and only about a thousand lockers. So what do they do instead of building more lockers? They make us fork over $50 for one small locker! Locker for every single student should be required in every high school. And making us pay for them is just plain ridiculous. Lockers can greatly reduce the pain that results from a heavy backpack, and everyone should be allowed one, not just those who have an extra $50 lying around.

TheTalkies

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